The Hunt for the World's
By MARK BOWDEN
Atlantic Monthly Press
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There was no more exciting place in South America to be in April 1948
than Bogotá, Colombia. Change was in the air, a static charge awaiting
direction. No one knew exactly what it would be, only that it was at hand.
It was a moment in the life of a nation, perhaps even a continent, when all
of history seemed a prelude.
Bogotá was then a city of more than a million that spilled down the
side of green mountains into a wide savanna. It was bordered by steep peaks
to the north and east, and opened up flat and empty to the south and west.
Arriving by air, one would see nothing below for hours but mountains, row
upon row of emerald peaks, the highest of them capped white. Light hit
the flanks of the undulating ranges at different angles, creating shifting
shades of chartreuse, sage, and ivy, all of them cut with red-brown tributaries
that gradually merged and widened as they coursed downhill to river
valleys so deep in shadow they were almost blue. Then abruptly from these
virgin ranges emerged a fully modern metropolis, a great blight of concrete
covering most of a wide plain. Most of Bogotá was just two or three
stories high, with a preponderance of red brick. From the center north, it
had wide landscaped avenues, with museums, classic cathedrals, and graceful
old mansions to rival the most elegant urban neighborhoods in the
world, but to the south and west were the beginnings of shantytowns where
refugees from the ongoing violence in the jungles and mountains sought
refuge, employment, and hope and instead found only deadening poverty.
In the north part of the city, far from this squalor, a great meeting was
about to convene, the Ninth Inter-American Conference. Foreign ministers
from all countries of the hemisphere were there to sign the charter for the
Organization of American States, a new coalition sponsored by the United
States that was designed to give more voice and prominence to the nations
of Central and South America. The city had been spruced up for the event,
with street cleanings and trash removal, fresh coats of paint on public buildings,
new signage on roadways, and, along the avenues, colorful flags and
plantings. Even the shoe-shine men on the street corners wore new uniforms.
The officials who attended meetings and parties in this surprisingly urbane
capital hoped that the new organization would bring order and respectability
to the struggling republics of the region. But the event had also attracted
critics, leftist agitators, among them a young Cuban student leader named
Fidel Castro. To them the fledgling OAS was a sop, a sellout, an alliance
with the gringo imperialists of the north. To idealists who had gathered from
all over the region, the postwar world was still up for grabs, a contest between
capitalism and communism, or at least socialism, and young rebels
like the twenty-one-year-old Castro anticipated a decade of revolution.
They would topple the region's calcified fuedal aristocracies and establish
peace, social justice, and an authentic Pan-American political bloc. They
were hip, angry, and smart, and they believed with the certainty of youth
that they owned the future. They came to Bogotá to denounce the new
organization and had planned a hemispheric conference of their own to coordinate
citywide protests. They looked for guidance from one man in particular,
an enormously popular forty-nine-year-old Colombian politician
named Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.
"I am not a man, I am a people!" was Gaitán's slogan, which he would
pronounce dramatically at the end of speeches to bring his ecstatic admirers
to their feet. He was of mixed blood, a man with the education and manner
of the country's white elite but the squat frame, dark skin, broad face,
and coarse black hair of Colombia's lower Indian castes. Gaitán's appearance
marked him as an outsider, a man of the masses. He could never fully
belong to the small, select group of the wealthy and fair-skinned who
owned most of the nation's land and natural resources, and who for generations
had dominated its government. These families ran the mines,
owned the oil, and grew the fruits, coffee, and vegetables that made up the
bulk of Colombia's export economy. With the help of technology and capital
offered by powerful U.S. corporate investors, they had grown rich selling
the nation's great natural bounty to America and Europe, and they had
used those riches to import to Bogotá a sophistication that rivaled the great
capitals of the world. Gaitán's skin color marked him as apart from them
just as it connected him with the excluded, the others, the masses of Colombian
people who were considered inferior, who were locked out of the
riches of this export economy and its privileged islands of urban prosperity.
But that connection had given Gaitán power. No matter how educated
and powerful he became, he was irrevocably tied to those others, whose
only option was work in the mines or the fields at subsistence wages, who
had no chance for education and opportunity for a better life. They constituted
a vast electoral majority.
Times were bad. In the cities it meant inflation and high unemployment,
while in the mountain and jungle villages that made up most of
Colombia it meant no work, hunger, and starvation. Protests by angry
campesinos, encouraged and led by Marxist agitators, had grown increasingly
violent. The country's Conservative Party leadership and its sponsors,
wealthy landowners and miners, had responded with draconian
methods. There were massacres and summary executions. Many foresaw
this cycle of protest and repression leading to another bloody civil
warthe Marxists saw it as the inevitable revolt. But most Colombians
were neither Marxists nor oligarchs; they just wanted peace. They wanted
change, not war. To them, this was Gaitán's promise. It had made him
In a speech two months earlier before a crowd of one hundred thousand
at the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, Gaitán had pleaded with the government
to restore order, and had urged the great crowd before him to
express their outrage and self-control by responding to his oration not with
cheers and applause but with silence. He had addressed his remarks directly
to President Mariano Ospina.
"We ask that the persecution by the authorities stop," he'd said. "Thus
asks this immense multitude. We ask a small but great thing: that our political
struggles be governed by the constitution.... Señor President, stop the
violence. We want human life to be defended, that is the least a people can
ask.... Our flag is in mourning, this silent multitude, this mute cry from our
hearts, asks only that you treat us ... as you would have us treat you."
Against a backdrop of such explosive forces, the silence of this throng
had echoed much more loudly than cheers. Many in the crowd had simply
waved white handkerchiefs. At great rallies like these, Gaitán seemed
poised to lead Colombia to a lawful, just, peaceful future. He tapped the
deepest yearnings of his countrymen.
A skillful lawyer and a socialist, he was, in the words of a CIA report
prepared years later, "a staunch antagonist of oligarchical rule and
a spellbinding orator." He was also a shrewd politician who had turned
his populist appeal into real political power. When the OAS conference
convened in Bogotá in 1948, Gaitán was not only the people's favorite,
he was the head of the Liberal Party, one of the country's two major political
organizations. His election as president in 1950 was regarded as a virtual
certainty. Yet the Conservative Party government, headed by President
Ospina, had left Gaitán off the bipartisan delegation appointed to represent
Colombia at the great conference.
Tensions were high in the city. Colombian historian German
Arciniegas would later write of "a chill wind of terror blowing in from the
provinces." The day before the conference convened, a mob attacked a car
carrying the Ecuadorian delegation, and rumors of terrorist violence seemed
confirmed the same day when police caught a worker attempting to plant a
bomb in the capital. In the midst of all the hubbub, Gaitán quietly went about
his law practice. He knew his moment was still a few years off, and he was
prepared to wait. The president's snub had only enhanced his stature among
his supporters, as well as among the more radical young leftists gathering to
protest, who otherwise might have dismissed Gaitán as a bourgeois liberal
with a vision too timid for their ambition. Castro had made an appointment
to meet with him.
Gaitán busied himself with defending an army officer accused of
murder, and on April 8, the day the conference convened, he won an acquittal.
Late the next morning, some journalists and friends stopped by his
office to offer congratulations. They chatted happily, arguing about where
to go for lunch and who would pay. Shortly before one o'clock, Gaitán
walked down to the street with the small group. He had two hours before
the scheduled meeting with Castro.
Leaving the building, the group walked past a fat, dirty, unshaven
man who let them pass and then ran to overtake them. The man, Juan Roa,
stopped and without a word leveled a handgun. Gaitán briskly turned and
started back toward the safety of his office building. Roa began shooting.
Gaitán fell with wounds to his head, lungs, and liver, and died within the
hour as doctors tried desperately to save him.
Gaitán's murder is where the modern history of Colombia starts.
There would be many theories about Roathat he had been recruited by
the CIA or by Gaitán's conservative enemies, or even by Communist extremists
who feared that their revolution would be postponed by Gaitán's
ascension. In Colombia, murder rarely has a shortage of plausible motives.
An independent investigation by officers of Scotland Yard determined that
Roa, a frustrated mystic with grandiose delusions, had nursed a grudge
against Gaitán and had acted alone; but since he was beaten to death on
the spot, his motives died with him. Whatever Roa's purpose, the rounds
he fired unleashed chaos. All hope for a peaceful future in Colombia ended.
All those brooding forces of change exploded into El Bogotazo, a spasm of
rioting so intense it left large parts of the capital city ablaze before spreading
to other cities. Many policemen, devotees of the slain leader, joined the
angry mobs in the streets, as did student revolutionaries like Castro. The
leftists donned red armbands and tried to direct the crowds, sensing with
excitement that their moment had arrived, but quickly realized that the
situation was beyond control. The mobs grew larger and larger, and protest
evolved into random destruction, drunkenness, and looting. Ospina
called in the army, which in some places fired into the crowds.
Everyone's vision of the future died with Gaitán. The official effort
to showcase a new era of stability and cooperation was badly tarnished;
the visiting foreign delegations signed the charter and fled the country.
The leftists' hopes of igniting South America's new communist era went
up in flames. Castro took shelter in the Cuban embassy as the army began
hunting down and arresting leftist agitators, who were blamed for
the uprising, but even a CIA history of the event would conclude that
the leftists were as much victims as everyone else. For Castro, an agency
historian wrote, the episode was profoundly disillusioning: "[It] may have
influenced his adoption in Cuba in the 1950s of a guerrilla strategy rather
than one of revolution through urban disorders."
El Bogotazo was eventually quieted in Bogotá and the other large cities,
but it lived on throughout untamed Colombia for years, metamorphosing
into a nightmarish period of bloodletting so empty of meaning it is
called simply La Violencia. An estimated two hundred thousand people were
killed. Most of the dead were campesinos, incited to violence by appeals
to religious fervor, land rights, and a bewildering assortment of local issues.
While Castro carried off his revolution in Cuba and the rest of the world
squared off in the Cold War, Colombia remained locked in this cabalistic
dance with death. Private and public armies terrorized the rural areas. The
government fought paramilitiaries and guerrillas, industrialists fought
unionists, conservative Catholics fought heretical liberals, and bandidos took
advantage of the free-for-all to plunder. Gaitán's death had unleashed
demons that had less to do with the emerging modern world than with
Colombia's deeply troubled past.
Colombia is a land that breeds outlaws. It has always been ungovernable,
a nation of wild unsullied beauty, steeped in mystery. From the
white peaks of the three cordilleras that form its western spine to the triple-canopy
equatorial jungle at sea level, it affords many good places to hide.
There are corners of Colombia still virtually untouched by man. Some are
among the only places left on this thoroughly trampled planet where botanists
and biologists can discover and attach their names to new species of
plants, insects, birds, reptiles, and even small mammals.
The ancient cultures that flourished here were isolated and stubborn.
With soil so rich and a climate so varied and mild, everything grew, so
there was little need for trade or commerce. The land ensnared one like a
sweet, tenacious vine. Those who came stayed. It took the Spanish almost
two hundred years to subdue just one people, the Tairona, who lived in a
lush pocket of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta foothills. European invaders
eventually defeated them the only way they could, by killing them
all. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spanish tried without
success to rule from neighboring Peru, and in the nineteenth century Simón
Bolívar tried to join Colombia with Peru and Venezuela to form a great
South American state, Gran Colombia. But even the great liberator could
not hold the pieces together.
Ever since Bolívar's death in 1830, Colombia has been proudly democratic,
but it has never quite got the hang of peaceful political evolution.
Its government is weak, by design and tradition. In vast regions to the south
and west, and even in the mountain villages outside the major cities, live
communities only lightly touched by nation, government, or law. The sole
civilizing influence ever to reach the whole country was the Catholic
Church, and that was accomplished only because clever Jesuits grafted their
Roman mysteries to ancient rituals and beliefs. Their hope was to grow a
hybrid faith, nursing Christianity from pagan roots to a locally flavored
version of the One True Faith, but in stubborn Colombia, it was Catholicism
that took a detour. It grew into something else, a faith rich with ancestral
connection, fatalism, superstition, magic, mystery ... and violence.
Violence stalks Colombia like a biblical plague. The nation's two
major political factions, the Liberals and Conservatives, fought eight civil
wars in the nineteenth century alone over the roles of church and state.
Both groups were overwhelmingly Catholic, but the Liberals wanted to
keep the priests off the public stage. The worst of these conflicts, which
began in 1899 and was called the War of a Thousand Days, left more than
one hundred thousand dead and utterly ruined whatever national government
and economy existed.
Caught between these two violent forces, the Colombian peasantry
learned to fear and distrust both. They found heroes in the outlaws who
roamed the Colombian wilderness as violent free agents, defying everyone.
During the War of a Thousand Days the most famous was José del
Carmen Tejeiro, who played upon popular hatred of the warring powers.
Tejeiro would not just steal from wealthy landowning enemies; he would
punish and humiliate them, forcing them to sign declarations such as "I was
whipped fifty times by José del Carmen Tejeiro as retribution for persecuting
him." His fame earned him supporters beyond Colombia's borders.
Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, sowing a little neighborhood instability,
presented Tejeiro with a gold-studded carbine.
A half century later, La Violencia bred a new colorful menagerie of
outlaws, men who went by names like Tarzan, Desquite (Revenge), Tirofijo
(Sureshot), Sangrenegra (Blackblood), and Chispas (Sparks). They roamed
the countryside, robbing, pillaging, raping, and killing, but because they
were allied with none of the major factions, their crimes were seen by many
common people as blows struck against power.
La Violencia eased only when General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seized
power in 1953 and established a military dictatorship. He lasted five years
before being ousted by more democratic military officers. A national plan
was put in place for Liberals and Conservatives to share the government,
alternating the presidency every four years. It was a system guaranteed to
prevent any real reforms or government-initiated social progress, because
any steps taken during one administration could be undone in the next.
The famous bandidos went on raiding and stealing in the hills, and occasionally
made halfhearted attempts to band together. In the end they were
not idealists or revolutionaries, just outlaws. Still, a generation of Colombians
grew up on their exploits. The bandidos were heroes despite themselves
to many of the powerless, terrorized, and oppressed poor. The nation
both thrilled and mourned as the army of the oligarchs in Bogotá hunted
them down, one by one. By the 1960s Colombia had settled into an enforced
stasis, with Marxist guerrillas in the hills and jungles (modern successors
to the bandido tradition) and a central government increasingly
dominated by a small group of rich, elite Bogotá families, powerless to effect
change and, anyway, disinclined. The violence, already deeply rooted in
the culture, continued, deepened, twisted.
Terror became art, a form of psychological warfare with a quasi-religious
aesthetic. In Colombia it wasn't enough to hurt or even kill your
enemy; there was ritual to be observed. Rape had to be performed in public,
before fathers, mothers, husbands, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters.
And before you killed a man, you first made him beg, scream, and gag
... or first you killed those he most loved before his eyes. To amplify revulsion
and fear, victims were horribly mutilated and left on display. Male
victims had their genitals stuffed in their mouths; women had their breasts
cut off and their wombs stretched over their heads. Children were killed
not by accident but slowly, with pleasure. Severed heads were left on pikes
along public roadways. Colombian killers perfected signature cuts, distinctive
ways of mutilating victims. One gang left its mark by slicing the neck
of a victim and then pulling his tongue down his throat and out through
the slice, leaving a grotesque "necktie." These horrors seldom directly
touched the educated urbanites of Colombia's ruling classes, but the waves
of fear widened and reached everywhere. No child raised in Colombia at
midcentury was immune to it. Blood flowed like the muddy red waters
that rushed down from the mountains. The joke Colombians told was that
God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it
was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating
it with the most evil race of men.
It was here, in the second year of La Violencia, that the greatest outlaw
in history, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, was born, on December 1, 1949.
He grew up with the cruelty and terror alive in the hills around his native
Medellín, and absorbed the stories of Desquite, Sangrenegra, and Tirofijo,
all of them full-blown legends by the time he was old enough to listen and
understand, most of them still alive and on the run. Pablo would outstrip
them all by far.
Anyone can be a criminal, but to be an outlaw demands a following.
The outlaw stands for something, usually through no effort of his own. No
matter how base the actual motives of criminals like those in the Colombian
hills, or like the American ones immortalized by HollywoodAl
Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse Jameslarge numbers of average people
rooted for them and followed their bloody exploits with some measure of
delight. Their acts, however selfish or senseless, were invested with social
meaning. Their crimes and violence were blows struck against distant,
oppressive power. Their stealth and cunning in avoiding soldiers and police
were celebrated, these being the time-honored tactics of the powerless.
Pablo Escobar would build on these myths. While the other outlaws
remained strictly local heroes, meaningful only as symbols, his power
would become both international and real. At his peak, he would threaten
to usurp the Colombian state. Forbes magazine would list him as the seventh-richest
man in the world in 1989. His violent reach would make him
the most feared terrorist in the world.
His success would owe much to his nation's unique culture and history,
indeed to its very soil and climate, with its bountiful harvests of coca
and marijuana. But an equal part of it was Pablo himself. Unlike any other
outlaw before, he understood the potency of legend. He crafted his and
nurtured it. He was a vicious thug, but he had a social conscience. He was
a brutal crime boss but also a politician with a genuinely winning personal
style that, at least for some, transcended the ugliness of his deeds. He was
shrewd and arrogant and rich enough to milk that popularity. He had, in
the words of former Colombian president César Gaviria, "a kind of native
genius for public relations." At his death, Pablo was mourned by thousands.
Crowds rioted when his casket was carried into the streets of his home city
of Medellín. People pushed the bearers aside and pried open the lid to
touch his cold, stiff face. His gravesite is tended lovingly to this day and
remains one of the most popular tourist spots in the city. He stood for
For what, exactly, isn't easy to understand without knowing Colombia
and his life and times. Pablo, too, was a creature of his time and place.
He was a complex, contradictory, and ultimately very dangerous man, in
large part because of his genius for manipulating public opinion. But this
same crowd-pleasing quality was also his weakness, the thing that eventually
brought him down. A man of lesser ambition might still be alive,
rich, powerful, and living well and openly in Medellín. But Pablo wasn't
content to be just rich and powerful. He wanted to be admired. He wanted
to be respected. He wanted to be loved.
When he was a small boy, his mother, Hermilda, the real shaping influence
in his life, made a vow before a statue in her home village of Frontino,
in the rural northwest part of the Colombian departamento, or state, of
Antioquia. The statue, an icon, was of the child Jesus of Atocha. Hermilda
Gaviria was a schoolteacher, an ambitious, educated, and unusually capable
woman for that time and place, who had married Abel de Jesús Escobar, a
self-sufficient cattle farmer. Pablo was their second son, and she had already
borne Abel a daughter. They would eventually have four more children. But
Hermilda was cursed with powerlessness. For all her learning and drive, she
knew that the fates of her ambition and her family were out of her hands.
She knew this not just in some abstract, spiritual way, the way religious men
and women accept the final authority of God. This was Colombia in the
1950s. The horror of La Violencia was everywhere. Unlike the relatively secure
cities, in villages like Frontino and the one where Hermilda and Abel
now lived, Rionegro, violent and terrible death was commonplace. The
Escobars were not revolutionaries; they were staunchly middle class. To
the extent that they had political leanings, they were allied with local
Conservative landowners, which made them targets for the Liberal armies
and insurrectionists who roamed the hills. Hermilda sought protection
and solace from the child Jesus of Atocha with the urgency of a young
wife and mother adrift in a sea of terror. In her prayers she vowed something
concrete and grand. Someday, she said, she would build a chapel
for Jesus of Atocha if God spared her family from the Liberals. Pablo
would build that chapel.
Pablo did not grow up poor, as he and his hired publicists would
sometimes later claim. Rionegro was not yet a suburb of Medellín, but a
collection of relatively prosperous cattle farms in the outlying districts. Abel
owned a house, twelve hectares, and six cows when Pablo was born, and
he tended adjacent land that he had sold to a well-known local Conservative
politician. The house had no electricity but did have running water.
For rural Colombia, this would qualify as upper middle class, and conditions
improved when they moved to Envigado, a village on the outskirts
of Medellín, a thriving city that was rapidly creeping up the green slopes
of the mountains around it. Hermilda was not just a schoolteacher but a
founder of Envigado's elementary school. When they moved there, Abel
gave up his farming to work as a neighborhood watchman. Hermilda was
an important person in the community, someone well-known to parents
and children alike. So even as schoolchildren, Pablo and his brothers and
sisters were special. Pablo did well in his classes, as his mother no doubt
expected, and he loved to play soccer. He was well dressed and, as his
chubby frame attested, well fed. Escobar liked fast food, movies, and popular
musicAmerican, Mexican, and Brazilian.
While there was still violence in Colombia, even as he entered his teens,
the raging terror of La Violencia gradually eased. Abel and Hermilda Escobar
emerged from it all to create a comfortable life for themselves and their seven
children. But just as the prosperity of the fifties in the United States bred a
restless, rebellious generation of children, so Pablo and his contemporaries
in Medellín had their own way of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. A
hippielike, nihilistic, countrywide youth movement called Nadaismo had its
origins right in Envigado, where its founder, the intellectual Fernando
Gonzáles, had written his manifesto "The Right to Disobey." Banned by the
church, barely tolerated by authorities, the Nadaistas the "nothingists"lampooned
their elders in song, dressed and behaved outrageously, and
expressed their disdain for the established order in the established way of
the sixties: they smoked dope.
Colombian dope was, of course, plentiful and highly potent, a fact that
the world's marijuana-toking millions quickly discovered. It was soon the
worldwide gold standard for pot. Pablo became a heavy doper early on and
stayed that way throughout his life, sleeping until one or two in the afternoon,
lighting up not long after waking up, and staying stoned for the rest
of the day and night. He was plump and short, standing just under five feet,
six inches, with a large, round face and thick, black, curly hair that he wore
long, combing it left to right in a big mound that sloped across his forehead
and covered his ears. He grew a wispy mustache. He looked out at the world
through big, heavy-lidded hazel eyes and cultivated the bemused boredom
of the chronic doper. Rebellion evidently took hold not long after he reached
puberty. He dropped out of Lyceum Lucrecio Jaramillo several months before
his seventeenth birthday, three years shy of graduation. His turn to crime
appears to have been motivated as much by ennui as ambition.
With his cousin and constant companion Gustavo Gaviria, he had taken
to hanging out nights at a bar in a tough neighborhood, the Jesús de Nazareno
district. He told Hermilda that he wasn't cut out for school or a normal job.
"I want to be big," he said. It was a testament to Hermilda's persistence, or
possibly Pablo's broader plans, that he never fully abandoned the idea of
education. He briefly returned to the lyceum two years later with Gustavo,
but the two, older than their classmates and accustomed now to the freedom
and rough-and-tumble of the Medellín streets, were considered bullies
and were soon fighting with their teachers. Neither lasted the school
year, although Pablo apparently tried several times, without success, to pass
the tests needed to earn a diploma. He eventually just bought one. In later
life he would fill shelves in his homes with stacks of unread classics and would
talk sometimes of wanting to earn a higher degree. At one point, entering
prison, he said he intended to study law. No doubt this lack of formal education
continued to feed his insecurities and disappoint Hermilda, but no
one who knew him doubted his natural cunning.
He became a gangster. There was a long tradition of shady business
practices in Medellín. The stereotypical paisa was a hustler, someone skilled
in turning a profit no matter what the enterprise. The region was famous
for contrabandistas, local heads of organized-crime syndicates, practitioners
of the centuries-old paisa tradition of smugglingoriginally gold and emeralds,
now marijuana, and soon cocaine. By the time Pablo dropped out of
school, in 1966, drug smuggling was already serious business, well over the
heads of seventeen-year-old hoodlums. Pablo got his start conning people
out of money on the streets of Medellín. But he had plans. When he told
his mother that he wanted to be big, he most likely had in mind two kinds
of success. Just as the contrabandistas dominated the illicit street life of
Medellín, its legitimate society was ruled politically and socially by a small
number of rich textile and mining industrialists and landowners. These were
the dons, the men of culture and education whose money bankrolled the
churches and charities and country clubs, who were feared and respected
by their employees and those who rented their land. Catholic, traditional, and
elitist, these men held high public office and went off to Bogotá to represent
Medellín in the national government. Pablo's ambition encompassed both
worlds, licit and illicit, and this marks the central contradiction of his career.
The standing legend of Pablo Escobar has it that he and his gang got
their start by stealing headstones from cemeteries, sandblasting them clean,
and then reselling them. He did have an uncle who sold tombstones, and
Pablo evidently worked for him briefly as a teenager. In later life he was
always amused when the sandblasting stories were told, and he denied
thembut then there was always much that Pablo denied. Hermilda has
also called the story a lie, and, indeed, it doesn't seem likely. For one thing,
sandblasting sounds too much like honest labor, and there is little to suggest
that Pablo ever had an appetite for that. And he was deeply superstitious.
He subscribed to that peculiarly pagan brand of Catholicism common
in rural Antioquia, one that prays to idolslike Hermilda's child Jesus of
Atochaand communes with dead spirits. Stealing headstones would be
an unlikely vocation for anyone who feared the spirit world. What sounds
more likely are stories he later admitted to, of running petty street scams
with his friends, selling contraband cigarettes and fake lottery tickets, and
conning people out of their cash with a mixture of bluff and charm as they
emerged from the local bank. Pablo would not have been the first street-smart
kid to discover that it was easier and more exciting to take money
from others than to earn it. He was exceptionally daring. Maybe it was the
dope, but Pablo discovered in himself an ability to remain calm, deliberate,
even cheerful when others grew frightened and unsteady. He used it
to impress his friends, and to frighten them. On several occasions as a youth,
Pablo later boasted, he had held up Medillín banks by himself with an
automatic rifle, bantering cheerfully with the clerks as they emptied their
cash drawers. That kind of recklessness and poise is what distinguished
Pablo from his criminal peers and made him their leader. Before long his
crimes would grow more sophisticated, and more dangerous.
The record shows that Pablo was an accomplished car thief before
he was twenty. He and his gang took the crude business of pinching cars
and turned it into a mini-industry, boldly taking vehicles (drivers would
just be pulled from behind the steering wheel in broad daylight) and chopping
them down to a collection of valuable parts within hours. There was
plenty of money to be made in parts, and no direct evidence of the theft
remained. Once he'd amassed sufficient capital, Pablo began simply bribing
municipal officials to issue new papers for stolen vehicles, eliminating
the need to disassemble the cars. He seems to have had few significant run-ins
with the law during this period. The arrest records have vanished, but
Pablo did spend several months in a Medellín jail before his twentieth
birthday, no doubt making connections with a more violent class of criminals,
who would later serve him well. Clearly the stint behind bars did
nothing to dissuade him from a life of crime.
By all accounts, Pablo was enjoying himself. With their wide inventory
of stolen engines and parts, he and Gustavo built race cars and
competed in local and national car rallies. His business evolved. In time,
car theft in Medellín was practiced with such impunity that Pablo realized
he had created an even more lucrative market. He started selling
protection. People paid him to prevent their vehicles from being pinched
so Pablo began making money on cars he didn't steal as well as from
those he did. Generous with his friends, he would give them new cars
stolen right from the factory. Pablo would draw up false bills of sale and
instruct the recipients to take out fake newspaper ads offering the cars
for sale, creating a paper trail to make it appear as though the cars had
been obtained legitimately.
It was during this period, as a young crime boss on the make, that
Pablo developed a reputation for casual, lethal violence. In what may have
begun as simply a method of debt collection, he would recruit thugs to
kidnap people who owed him money and then ransom them for whatever
was owed. If the family couldn't come up with the money or refused to
pay, the victim would be killed. Sometimes the victim was killed after the
ransom was paid, just to make a point. It was murder, but a kind of murder
that can be rationalized. A man had to protect his interests. Pablo lived in
a world where accumulation of wealth required the capacity to defend it.
Even for legitimate businessmen in Medellín there was little effective or
honest law enforcement. If someone cheated you, you either accepted your
losses or took steps yourself to settle the score. If you grew successful
enough, you had to contend with corrupt police and government officials
who wanted a piece of your profits. This was especially true in Pablo's new
illicit business. As the amounts of money and contraband grew, so did the
need to enforce discipline, punish enemies, collect debts, and bribe officials.
Kidnapping or even killing someone who had cheated him not only
kept the books balanced; it sent a message.
Pablo became expert at taking credit for crimes that could not be
linked to him directly. From the start, he made sure that those he recruited
to commit violent acts were never certain who had hired them. In time,
Pablo grew accustomed to ordering people killed. It fed his growing megalomania
and bred fearwhich was akin to the respect he seemed to crave
more and more.
Kidnapping for debt collection evolved soon enough into kidnapping
for its own sake. The most famous case attributed to young Pablo was
that of Envigado industrialist Diego Echavarria, in the summer of 1971.
Echavarria was a proud Conservative factory owner, widely respected in
higher social circles but disliked by many of the poor workers in Medellín,
who were being laid off in droves from local textile mills. At the time,
wealthy Antioquia landowners were expanding their country holdings by
simply evicting whole villages of farmers from the Magdalena River Valley,
leaving them no alternative but to move to the slums of the growing
city. The unpopular factory owner's body was found in a hole not far from
the place where Pablo was born. He had been kidnapped six weeks earlier
and had been beaten and strangled, even though his family had paid a
$50,000 ransom. The killing of Diego Echavarria worked on two levels. It
turned a profit and it doubled as a blow for social justice. There is no way
to prove that Pablo orchestrated this crime, and he was never officially
charged with it, but it was so widely attributed to him that in the slums people
began referring to Pablo admiringly as Doctor Echavarria, or simply El Doctor.
The killing had all the hallmarks of the young crime boss's emerging style:
cruel, deadly, smart, and with an eye toward public relations.
In one stroke, the Echavarria kidnapping elevated Pablo to the status
of local legend. It also advertised his ruthlessness and ambition, which
didn't hurt either. In coming years, he would become even more of a hero
to many in Medellín's slums with well-publicized acts of charity. He had
a social conscience, but his aspirations were strictly middle class. When
he told his mother he wanted to be "big," he wasn't dreaming of revolution
or remaking his country; he had in mind living in a mansion as spectacular
as the mock medieval castle Echavarria had built for himself. He
would live in a castle like that, not as someone who exploited the masses
but as a people's don, a man of power and wealth who had not lost touch
with the common man. His deepest anger was always reserved for those
who interfered with that fantasy.
(C) 2001 Mark Bowden All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-87113-783-6